Home Assistant SMTP Notify Error

I recently upgraded my Home Assistant to 2026.5.1 and started receiving the following error that my previously working SMTP notification automation was now failing.

Here's a trace of the automation failure.

Notifications: Send a notification with brian_smtp_jason_burns_team

Executed: May 13, 2026 at 7:51:34 PM  

Error: Action notify.brian_smtp_jason_burns_team not found

Result:

params:
  domain: notify
  service: brian_smtp_jason_burns_team
  service_data:
    title: Google Fiber IP Changed
    message: Google Fiber IP Address changed to unavailable
  target: {}
running_script: false

This is supposed to email me whenever my Google Fiber IP changes. That's helpful for web systems I run that need to allow my home IP in the firewall. Since I've migrated everything to Tailscale I don't really need this automation anymore, but that's a separate subject.

I did some searching and couldn't find anything obvious that matched my own problem.

There is this closed GitHub issue that seemingly matches my problem: https://github.com/home-assistant/core/issues/145015

Their config:

notify:
  - name: "SMTP-SSEW"

and their error :

Action notify.smtp_ssew not found

But the user upgraded and the problem went away.

So I searched more, read the docs, and looked at my own config.

Here's what my config has in configuration.yaml

# Brian Internal SMTP Server
notify:
  - name: "brian-smtp-jason-burns-team"
    platform: smtp
    server: <my-server-ip>
    port: 25
    verify_ssl: false
    sender: "my-sender-email"
    sender_name: "Home Assistant"
    recipient: "my-recipient-address"

And HERE is the documentation string:

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/smtp/

# Example configuration.yaml entry
notify:
  - name: "NOTIFIER_NAME"
    platform: smtp
    sender: "YOUR_SENDER"
    recipient: "YOUR_RECIPIENT"

Now, keen reader, you have every single piece of information that you need to solve this problem, and the problem of the user from 2025!

Look.

Closer.

Do you see it?

Both myself and the user experiencing this problem last year defined our notify name in the configuration.yaml using DASHES. However, the documentation and the error logs are printing the notification name they're looking for in UNDERSCORES.

I think there may be an opportunity to improve the code or the documentation here.

I changed my notify config to the following in configuration.yaml, restarted Home Assistant, and the error went away:

# Brian Internal SMTP Server
notify:
  - name: "brian_smtp_jason_burns_team"

So, user https://github.com/niighthawk and anyone coming after, know that your Home Assistant SMTP notify name should use underscores and not dashes.

Perhaps a follow-up blog will have me dig into the code that parses this and see if I can make it work reliably regardless of the characters used.

EDIT - Maybe I'm Wrong?

Apparently the code to turn the notify name into an entity uses the python slugify(), which should properly turn the dashes into underscores.

The problem I had was most likely because the SMTP server wasn't available for some reason the last time Home Assistant started. Therefore, the notify entity wasn't created and the automation couldn't reach it.

Changing the spaces to underscores, then restarting Home Assistant, likely fixed this for me BECAUSE of the Home Assistant restart. Maybe? Unfortunately I don't have the logs going back to the earlier restart, so when I get some free time I may play around with this more.